TED2008 – TED Bloghttp://blog.ted.com
The TED Blog shares interesting news about TED, TED Talks video, the TED Prize and more.Tue, 26 Sep 2017 21:41:58 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://1.gravatar.com/blavatar/909a50edb567d0e7b04dd0bcb5f58306?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngTED2008 – TED Bloghttp://blog.ted.com
TED Weekends: Understanding evilhttp://blog.ted.com/ted-weekends-understanding-evil/
http://blog.ted.com/ted-weekends-understanding-evil/#commentsSat, 09 Mar 2013 16:00:14 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=72540[…]]]>Philip Zimbardo knows evil inside and out.
Philip Zimbardo: The psychology of evil
He led the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 and was an expert witness at Abu Ghraib, privy to graphic unseen images. At TED2008, Zimbardo explains how easy it is for the good to turn evil, and on the flip side, for inspiration to lead people to heroism.

These two questions have been challenging me since I was a kid, and finally after many decades, I have discovered answers that I need to share with everyone who might care about these fundamental issues of human nature.

Growing up in poverty in the inner city of the South Bronx, New York City, means that I — like all such kids similarly situated everywhere in the world — was surrounded by evil. There were and are always hustlers, guys who make a living by getting good kids to do bad things for a little money — like steal, run drugs, sell their bodies, and worse. Why did some kids give in and start down that slippery slope of evil, while others resisted and stayed on the right side of that line separating good from evil? Read the full essay »

In 1977, a 21-year-old political prisoner, Ali Moosavi, was tortured in Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran, by SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police. Ali was a devout follower of Ayatollah Khomeini, whom the vast majority of Iranians — including Marxists, Islamists, liberals, seculars, etc. — came to support during the revolution as the only leader who could unite everyone against the monarchy. Ali was hung from a ceiling in a torture room in Evin. He was beaten for hours and then repeatedly electrocuted. He believed in his cause, which, according to him, had to do with bringing justice and democracy to Iran. To many people, he was a hero.

In 1982, it had been about three years since Iran had become an Islamic republic, but the country was neither free nor democratic. On a daily basis, thousands of young people protested on the streets against the antidemocratic policies of the new regime. Hundreds of protestors were arrested and then tortured in Evin. It was supposed to be shut down with the success of the revolution in 1979, but it wasn’t. In 1980, Ali Moosavi became an interrogator in Evin and tortured teenagers. Read the full essay »

One of our biggest misconceptions about human nature is that the people around us are of consistent, predictable character. When thinking about one another we tend to oversimplify, categorizing each individual as either a good or an evil person, a hero or a coward, and so forth.

But the reality of our social universe is far more nuanced. People are complicated and compellingly contradictory. Human nature is surprisingly context-dependent.

Zimbardo makes this case using graphic visual evidence to show us the darkest capabilities of otherwise ordinary individuals. But our tendency to explain away bad behavior as the result of “a few bad apples” isn’t limited to egregious atrocities. In fact, I rely on the very same principles when speaking to corporations and other organizations about, say, the psychology of fraud and unethical behavior. Read the full essay »

]]>http://blog.ted.com/ted-weekends-understanding-evil/feed/4Phil-ZimbardoshirinsmooreCountdown to the Charter for Compassion on TED.comhttp://blog.ted.com/countdown_to_th/
http://blog.ted.com/countdown_to_th/#commentsSun, 01 Nov 2009 09:48:00 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2009/11/countdown_to_th/[…]]]>In February 2008, Karen Armstrong won the TED Prize and made her wish — to create a Charter for Compassion, a document about the core shared value of every world religion and moral code, the Golden Rule. This document will be released to the world on November 12, the result of months of collaborative work by diverse religious leaders and great thinkers.

Today, to pave the way for the Charter’s unveiling, we’re sharing six short talks on compassion from six different perspectives — from a Rabbi, an Imam, a Reverend, a Tenzin, a Swami and a secular voice of compassion. We hope that in the week following the launch, thousands of sermons and many more discussions on the nature of compassion will take place around the world, and so, thousands of ideas will be shared.

Interesting question, but there’s no research on this relationship. Bullies are often people who are shy and can’t make friends easily, so, as the theme of the movie A Bronx Tale tells us, it is better to be feared if you can’t be loved. They substitute dominance for social support, and may have been abused earlier so carry on the use of power in dealing with others. They graduate onto becoming workplace bullies and making many other worker’s lives miserable. However, bullies may be the perpetrators of evil but it is the evil of passivity of all those who know what is happening and never intervene that perpetuates such abuse.

Lots of stuff: feeling as the object of the other’s attention, feeling being evaluated or judged, singled out even for commendation, alone with a member of opposite sex, feeling inadequate around superiors, even imagining future scenarios of social failures. Check out my books: Shyness: What It Is, What to Do About It, and The Shy Child.

How do you keep love alive? — Chris West

Remembering and enacting the song: “I love you more today than yesterday, but not as much as tomorrow.” Say each day, “l love you.” Do something that makes the object of love feel special, wanted, and desired. Put Post-its around with hearts and your initials and that of your loved one. If it is romantic love, work at making love as often as possible and with as much sensuous pleasure as possible. Don’t have sex when you are tired, overfed or drunk or bored; just go to sleep and do it the next day.

Is suffering a part of what it means to be a hero? — Pedro Fontes

Not at all. My definition of heroism is “taking action on behalf of others (or a moral cause) in need, with awareness of potential personal cost and no expectation of tangible rewards.” Others may be suffering of being unfairly wronged, and the hero recognizes that injustice or pain and acts socio-centrically to prevent or mitigate the wrong or the pain. See my website, TheLuciferEffect.com (celebrating heroism), EverydayHeroism.org.

What is the greatest mistake the field of psychology has made? — Justin Paine

Focusing for so long on the negatives in human nature, like mental illness, aggression, prejudice and antisocial behavior. Psychologists are optimists who believe that understanding the causal mechanisms in such phenomena they can begin to prevent, modify or change such negative states and behaviors. However, this focus on the Yin prevented most psychologists from recognizing the Yang — the positives about people and human nature. That focus on the negative is being corrected by the Positive Psychology movement, started by U. Penn. Professor Martin Seligman in 1998. Just this weekend that group held the first annual International Positive Psychology AssociationWorld Congress in Philadelphia, attended by more than 1,700 people from more than 30 nations. Their focus is recognizing and building human strengths and virtues, and doing so across the school curriculum, in business and the military and more. It is an exciting new field of scientific research, education and application.

Which political system is the most humane? — Xenia Benivolski

People want fairness, justice and to have the opportunity to make a difference in the world they inhabit. They want to succeed by merit and effort. In general, participatory democracy can help best to achieve such goals and needs, where it is truly created and maintained by the will of the people and is not merely illusionary democracies, where votes are rigged or fraud and corruption dominates. We are in the midst of a unique world experience in Iran, created by the electronic revolution that is making the entire world instantly aware of that likely fraudulent vote and the need for an honest, supervised re-casting of votes. In the past, the United States government has supported a bunch of pseudo-democracies around the world as long as their leaders were anti-Communism or even fascist juntas.

Great question. It is one I used to pose in my Mind Control course at Stanford University, going one step further and inviting students to design such a cult. Many cults start off with high ideals that get corrupted by leaders or their board of advisors who become power-hungry and dominate and control members’ lives. No group with high ideals starts off as a “cult”; they become one when their errant ways are exposed. A good cult delivers on its promises. A good cult nourishes the needs of its members, has transparency and integrity, and creates provisions for challenging its leadership openly. A good cult expands the freedoms and well-being of its members rather than limits them.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/you_asked_phili/feed/2matthewtoastPhilZimbardo_blog_ask.jpgGorgeous graphic notes from TED2009http://blog.ted.com/gorgeous_graphi/
http://blog.ted.com/gorgeous_graphi/#commentsMon, 25 May 2009 16:00:00 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2009/05/gorgeous_graphi/[…]]]>
YouTube’s Margaret Stewart shares her sketchbook notes from the TED2009 sessions — a lively, personal way to see TED through one creative person’s eyes. Click the image above to view the full set of sketchbook pages.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/gorgeous_graphi/feed/1emilyted3342423552_cffca3c67a.jpgWhat went wrong (and what’s next) at the Large Hadron Collider: Brian Cox’s update on TED.comhttp://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_what_went_wrong_at_the_lhc
http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_what_went_wrong_at_the_lhc#commentsFri, 01 May 2009 10:15:00 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2009/05/brian_cox_updat/[…]]]>Yesterday, CERN announced that the Large Hadron Collider (which spectacularly failed last September) could be turned on again as soon as this August. In this short talk from TED U 2009, physicist Brian Cox shares what’s new with CERN’s supercollider. He covers the repairs now underway and what the future holds for the largest science experiment ever attempted. (Recorded at TED U 2009, February 2009, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 3:30.)

]]>http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_what_went_wrong_at_the_lhc/feed/1tedstaffWatch Karen Armstrong on Bill Moyers Journalhttp://blog.ted.com/watch_karen_arm/
http://blog.ted.com/watch_karen_arm/#respondThu, 12 Mar 2009 22:00:00 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2009/03/watch_karen_arm/]]>TED Prize blog: Friday night at 9pm (in most US cities), tune in to Bill Moyers Journal for an interview with TED Prize winner Karen Armstrong on the Charter for Compassion. From the show:

My work has continually brought me back to the notion of compassion. Whichever religious tradition I study, I find at the heart of it is the idea of feeling with the other, experiencing with the other, compassion. And every single one of the major world religions has developed its own version of the Golden Rule. Don’t do to others what you would not like them to do to you.

… We’ve got to do better than this. Compassion doesn’t mean feeling sorry for people. It doesn’t mean pity. It means putting yourself in the position of the other, learning about the other. Learning what’s motivating the other, learning about their grievances.

Watch Karen Armstrong make her audacious wish during the TED Prize session at TED2008:

]]>http://blog.ted.com/watch_karen_arm/feed/0emilytedUncovering the footprints of early walking humanshttp://blog.ted.com/uncovering_the/
http://blog.ted.com/uncovering_the/#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2009 08:51:07 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2009/02/uncovering_the/[…]]]>As published today in the journal Science, a dig near Ileret, Kenya, has uncovered early human footprints in a streambed — quite possibly, evidence of the first hominids who walked on two legs as a matter of course. In the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s well-reported story, “Footprints offer clue on path to modern man,” TED2009 speaker Nina Jablonski offers her opinion on the fossil impressions:

… There is no doubt that the new prints are a rare find, and that the creatures who made them were spending not most, but all of their time on two feet, said Nina Jablonski, head of the anthropology department at Pennsylvania State University.

Their long, efficient strides would have allowed them to stray from the wood’s edge, crossing open spaces to find other sources of food and possibly do some hunting, said Jablonski, who was not involved with the research.

This would in turn allow for the continued development of a larger brain — a process that already was under way as early humans spent less time in trees, freeing up their hands to accomplish more complex tasks.

NPR’s story has more reactions from scientists, and more photos, including the image illustrating this post.

Photo: This fossil footprint found near Ileret, Kenya, is 1.5 million years old. These footprints are the oldest ever found of the human genus. Image: Matthew Bennett/Bournemouth University, via NPR.org

The newest edition of UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger totes up 6,000 world languages — and counts 2,500 as endangered and 200 as completely lost. The interactive atlas, released today, ranks the 2,500 endangered languages by five levels of vitality: unsafe, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct. This free, browsable resource complements a print version to be released next month. From UNESCO’s announcement:

For example, the Atlas states that 199 languages have fewer than ten speakers and 178 others have 10 to 50. Among the languages that have recently become extinct, it mentions Manx (Isle of Man), which died out in 1974 when Ned Maddrell fell forever silent, Aasax (Tanzania), which disappeared in 1976, Ubykh (Turkey) in 1992 with the demise of Tevfik Esenc, and Eyak (Alaska, United States of America), in 2008 with the death of Marie Smith Jones.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/unescos_latest/feed/5emilytedUNESCO.jpgThe immense promise of DNA folding: Paul Rothemund on TED.comhttp://www.ted.com/talks/paul_rothemund_details_dna_folding?language=en
Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:00:00 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2008/09/the_immense_pro/[…]]]>At TED2007, Paul Rothemund gave TED a short summary of DNA folding (calling it a process akin to magic). Now, he lays out in clear, adundant detail the immense promise of this field — to create tiny machines that assemble themselves from a set of instructions. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 16:24.)

]]>tedstaffRickshaw Bagworks opens shop onlinehttp://blog.ted.com/rickshaw_bagwor/
Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:58:30 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2008/07/rickshaw_bagwor/[…]]]>The TED2008 Gift Bag was the first product from a brand-new company, Rickshaw Bagworks. Made in San Francisco with sustainable fabrics and thoughtful details, the TED bags becamea bit of acult item — not least because they weren’t available for retail sale at the time of the ’08 conference.

]]>tedstaffRickshaw.jpgHelp bring compassion back to religion: Karen Armstrong’s TED Prize wish on TED.comhttp://www.ted.com/talks/karen_armstrong_makes_her_ted_prize_wish_the_charter_for_compassion?language=en
http://www.ted.com/talks/karen_armstrong_makes_her_ted_prize_wish_the_charter_for_compassion?language=en#commentsWed, 19 Mar 2008 06:21:26 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2008/03/karen_armstrong_1/[…]]]>As she accepts her 2008 TED Prize, author and scholar Karen Armstrongtalks about how the Abrahamic religions — Islam, Judaism, Christianity — have been diverted from the moral purpose they share: to foster compassion. But Armstrong has seen a yearning to change this fact. People want to be religious, she says; we should act to help make religion a force for harmony. She asks the TED community to help her build a Charter for Compassion — to help restore the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) as the central global religious doctrine. To brainstorm on this wish and get involved, visit TEDPrize.org >>(Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 21:27.)

Well this is such an honor. And it’s wonderful to be in the presence of an organization that is really making a difference in the world. And I’m intensely grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today. And I’m also rather surprised, because when I look back on my life, the last thing I ever wanted to do was to write or be in any way involved about religion. After I left my convent I’d finished with religion, frankly. I thought that was it. And for thirteen years I kept clear of it. I wanted to be an English literature professor. And I suddenly didn’t even want to be a writer, particularly. But then I suffered a series of career catastrophes, one after the other, and finally found myself in television. I said that to Bill Moyers and he said, “Oh, we take anybody.”

And I was doing some rather controversial religious programs. This went down very well in the UK, where religion is extremely unpopular. And so, for once, for the only time in my life, I was finally in the mainstream. But I got sent to Jerusalem to make a film about early Christianity, and there, for the first time, I encountered the other religious traditions, Judaism and Islam, the sister religions of Christianity. And while I found I knew nothing about these faiths at all despite my own intensely religious background, I’d seen Judaism only as a kind of prelude to Christianity and I knew nothing about Islam at all. But in that city, in that tortured city, where you see the three faiths jostling so uneasily together, you also become aware of the profound connection between them. And it has been the study of other religious traditions that brought me back to a sense of what religion can be, and actually enable me to take a look at my own faith in a different light.

I found some astonishing things in the course of my study that had never occurred to me. Frankly, in the days that when I thought I’d had it with religion, I just found the whole thing absolutely incredible. These doctrines seemed unproven, abstract, and, to my astonishment, when I began seriously studying other traditions, I began to realize that belief, which we make such a fuss about today, is only a very recent religious enthusiasm. It surfaced only in the West, in about the 17th century. The word “belief” itself originally meant to love, to prize, to hold dear. In the 17th century it narrowed its focus, for reasons that I’m exploring in a book I’m writing at the moment, to include — to mean an intellectual ascent to a set of propositions — a credo. I believe did not mean “I accept certain creedal articles of faith.” It meant, “I commit myself. I engage myself.” Indeed, some of the world traditions think very little of religious orthodoxy. In the Qur’an, religious opinion — religious orthodoxy — is dismissed as zanna — self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can be certain of one way or the other but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian.

So, if religion is not about believing things, what is it about? What I’ve found is that, across the board, religion is about behaving differently. Instead of deciding whether or not you believe in God, first you do something, you behave in a committed way, and then you begin to understand the truths of religion. And religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action: you only understand them when you put them into practice.

Now, pride of place in this practice is given to compassion. And it is an arresting fact that right across the board, in every single one of the major world faiths, compassion — the ability to feel with the other, and the way we’ve been thinking about this evening — is not only the test of any true religiosity, it is also what will bring us into the presence of what Jews, Christians and Muslims call “God” or the “Divine.” It is compassion, says the Buddha, which brings you to Nirvana. Why? Because in compassion, when we feel with the other, we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there. And once we get rid of ego, then we’re ready to see the Divine. And, in particular, every single one of the major traditions has highlighted — has said — has put at the core of their tradition — what’s become known as the Golden Rule. First propounded by Confucius five centuries before Christ, “Do not do unto others what you would not like them to do to you.” That, he said, was the central thread that ran through all his teaching and that his disciples should put into practice all day and every day. And it was the Golden Rule would bring them to the transcendent value that he called rén, human-heartedness, which was a transcendent experience in itself.

And this is absolutely crucial to the monotheisms, too. There’s a famous story about the great rabbi Hillel, the contemporary of Jesus. A pagan came to him and offered to convert to Judaism if the rabbi could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. Hillel stood on one leg and said, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor — that is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and study it.”

And “Go and study it” is what he meant. He said, in your exegesis, you must make it clear that every single verse of the Torah is a commentary, a gloss upon the Golden Rule. The great Rabbi Meir said that any interpretation of scripture which led to hatred and disdain or contempt of other people — any people whatsoever — was illegitimate. Saint Augustine made exactly the same point. “Scripture,” he says, “teaches nothing but charity, and we must not leave an interpretation of scripture until we have found a compassionate interpretation of it.” And this struggle to find compassion in some of these rather rebarbative texts is a good dress rehearsal for doing the same in ordinary life.

But now look at our world. And we are living in a world that is — where religion has been hijacked. Where terrorists cite Qur’anic verses to justify their atrocities. Where instead of taking Jesus’ words, “Love your enemies, don’t judge others,” we have the spectacle of Christians endlessly judging other people, endlessly using scripture as a way of arguing with other people, as a way of putting other people down. Throughout the ages, religion has been used to oppress others, and this is because of human ego, human greed. We have a talent as a species for messing up wonderful things.

So, the traditions also insisted — and this is an important point, I think — that you could not and must not confine your compassion to your own group, your own nation, your own co-religionists, your own fellow countrymen. You know, you must have what one of the Chinese sages called rén ài, concern for everybody. Love your enemies. Honor the stranger. We formed you, says the Qur’an, into tribes and nations so that you may know one another. And this, again — this universal outreach — is getting subdued in the strident use of religion — abuse of religion — for nefarious gains. Now, I’ve lost count of the number of taxi drivers who, when I say to them what I do for a living, inform me that religion has been the cause of all the major wars in world history. Wrong. The cause of our present woes are political. But, make no mistake about it, religion is a kind of fault line, and when a conflict gets ingrained in a region, religion can get sucked in and become part of the problem. Our modernity has been exceedingly violent. Between 1914 and 1945, 70 million people died in Europe alone as a result of armed conflict. And so many of our institutions — even football, which used to be a pleasant pastime — now causes riots where people even die. And it’s not surprising that religion, too, has been affected by this violent ethos.

There’s also a great deal, I think, of religious illiteracy around. People seem to think — now equate religious faith with believing things. As though that — we call religious people often “believers,” as though that were the main thing that they do. And very often, secondary goals get pushed into the first place in place of compassion — the Golden Rule. Because the Golden Rule is difficult. I — sometimes, when I’m speaking to congregations about compassion, I sometimes see a mutinous expression crossing some of their faces because religion — a lot of religious people prefer to be right, rather than compassionate.

Now — but that’s not the whole story. Since September the 11th, when my work on Islam suddenly propelled me into public life in a way that I’d never imagined, I’ve been able to sort of go all over the world — and finding, everywhere I go, a yearning for change. I’ve just come back from Pakistan, where literally thousands of people came to my lectures because they were yearning, first of all, to hear a friendly Western voice. And especially the young people were coming, and were asking me — the young people were saying, “What can we do? What can we do to change things?” And my hosts in Pakistan said, “Look, don’t be too polite to us. Tell us where we’re going wrong. Let’s talk together about where religion is failing.” Because it seems to me that with our current situation is so serious at the moment that any ideology that doesn’t promote a sense of global understanding and global appreciation of each other is failing the test of the time. And religion, with its wide following here in the United States — people may be being religious here in different way, as a report has just shown — but they still want to be religious. It’s only Western Europe that has retained its secularism, which is now beginning to look rather endearingly old-fashioned.

But people want to be religious and religion should be made to be a force for harmony in the world, which it can and should be — because of the Golden Rule, “Do not do unto others what you would not have them do to you”: an ethos that should now be applied globally. We should not treat other nations as we would not wish to be treated ourselves. And these — whatever our wretched beliefs — is a religious matter, is a spiritual matter. It’s a profound moral matter that engages — and should engage us all. And as I say, there is a hunger for change out there. Here in the United States, I think you see it in this election campaign: a longing for change. And people in churches all over — and mosques all over this continent after September 11th, coming together locally to create networks of understanding. With the mosques, with the synagogue, saying, “We must start to speak to one another.” I think it’s time we moved beyond the idea of toleration and move toward appreciation of the other.

I’d — there’s one story I’d just like to mention, and this comes from the Iliad. But it tells you what this spirituality should be. You know the story of the Iliad, the ten-year war between Greece and Troy. In one incident, Achilles, the great warrior of Greece, takes his troops out of the war, and the whole war effort suffers, and in the course of the ensuing muddle, his beloved friend is killed — and killed in single combat by one of the Trojan princes, Hector. And Achilles goes mad with grief and rage and revenge, and he mutilates the body — he kills Hector, and he mutilates his body and then he refuses to give the body back for burial to the family, which means that, in Greek ethos, Hector’s soul will wander eternally, lost. And then one night, Priam, king of Troy, an old man, comes into the Greek camp, incognito, makes his way to Achilles’ tent to ask for the body of his son. And everybody is shocked when the old man takes off his head covering, shows himself. And Achilles looks at him and thinks of his father. And he starts to weep. And Priam looks at the man who has murdered so many of his sons, and he too starts to weep. And the sound of their weeping filled the house. The Greeks believed that weeping together created a bond between people. And then Achilles takes the body of Hector, he hands it tenderly to the father, and the two men look at each other, and see each other as divine. That is the ethos found too in all the religions: it’s what is meant by overcoming the horror that we feel when we are under threat of our enemies — beginning to appreciate the other.

It’s of great importance that the word for “holy” in Hebrew, applied to God, is kadosh, separate, other. And it is often, perhaps, the otherness of our enemies that can give us intimations of that utterly mysterious transcendence which is God. And now, here’s my wish:

I wish that you would help with the creation, launch, and propagation of a Charter for Compassion — crafted by a group of inspirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and based on the fundamental principle of the Golden Rule. We need to create a movement among all these people that I meet in my travels, that you probably meet too, who want to join up, in some way, and reclaim their faith, which they feel, as I say, has been hijacked. We need to empower people to remember the compassionate ethos, and to give guidelines. This Charter would not be a massive document. I’d like to see it — to give guidelines as to how to interpret the scriptures, these texts that are being abused. Remember what the rabbis, and what Augustine said about how scripture should be governed by the principle of charity. Let’s get back to that, and the idea, too, of Jews, Christians and Muslims, these traditions now so often at loggerheads, working together to create a document which we hope will be signed by a thousand, at least, of major religious leaders from all the traditions of the world. And you are the people. I’m just a solitary scholar. Despite the idea that I love a good time, which I was rather amazed to see coming up on the — I actually spend a great deal of time alone, studying, and I’m not very — you’re the people with the media knowledge to explain to me how we can get this to everybody.

I’ve had some preliminary talks, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for example, is very happy to give his name to this, as is Imam Faisal Rauf, the Imam in New York City. Also, I would be working with the Alliance of Civilizations at the United Nations. I was part of that United Nations initiative called the Alliance of Civilizations, which was asked by Kofi Annan to diagnose the causes of extremism and to give practical guidelines to member states about how to avoid the escalation of further extremism. And the Alliance has told me they are very happy to work with it. The importance of this is — that this is — I can see some of you starting to look worried because you think it’s a slow and cumbersome body, but what the United Nations can do is give us some neutrality, so that this isn’t seen as a Western or a Christian initiative, but that it’s coming, as it were, from the United Nations, from the world — who would help with the sort of bureaucracy of this.

And so I do urge you to join me in making — in this Charter. To building this Charter, launching it, and propagating it so that it becomes — I’d like to see it in every college, every church, every mosque, every synagogue in the world, so that people can look at their tradition, reclaim it, and make religion a source of peace in the world, which it can and should be. Thank you very much.

“Imagine Martin Luther King saying, ‘I have a dream … But I don’t know if the others will buy it.’” – Boston Philharmonic conductor Ben Zander, on the importance of persuasive leadership

“Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying to change it. Well, I’m Bob and I’m an unreasonable person. And if TED is anything, it is the olympics of unreasonable people.” – Musician and activist Bob Geldof (above)

“Why are we ignoring the oceans? Why does NASA spend in one year what NOAA will spend in 1600 years? Why are we looking up? Why are we afraid of the ocean?” – Ocean explorer Robert Ballard

“Relative to the universe, it’s just up the road.” – Physicist Brian Cox, after referring to Chicago as ‘just up the road’ from Monterey, CA

“If you think half of America votes badly because they are stupid or religious, you are trapped in a matrix … Take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix.” – Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis

“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.” – Jonathan Haidt, quoting Sent-ts’an, from 700CE China

“The job of the C is to make the B sad.” – Boston Philharmonic conductor Ben Zander, deconstructing a piece by Chopin

“How do we give credible hope to the billion poorest people in the world? It requires compassion to get ourselves started, and enlightened self-interest to get serious… If economic divergence continues, combined with global integration, it will build a nightmare for our children.” – Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion

“In order to solve the climate crisis, we need to solve the democracy crisis.” – Al Gore, urging citizen involvement not only on a personal level, but also on a political level

“How dare we be pessimistic? Maybe the future is better than it used to be.” – Peter Schwartz, co-founder of the Global Business Network

“It’s important to leave the security of who we are, and go to the place of who we are becoming. I encourage you to let yourself out of any prison you might find yourself in. Because we have to do something now. We have to change now.” – Environmental advocate John Francis (below), who went 17 years without speaking

John Francis calls himself a "planetwalker". From 1983 to 2005, he
walked around North and Nouth America carrying a message of respect for
the Earth — and for 17 of those years, he did so without speaking (all
while learning a degree in environmental studies and a PhD in land
resources). (A profile of him in Sierra magazine).
I’ve been silent for 17 years. When I first spoke, I turned around to hear my own voice. I want to take you on this journey, even though this one is kind of unusual I want you to think of your own. My journey begain in 1971 when I witnessed two oil tankers collide under the Golden Gate bridge and half a million gallons of oil spilled out. It so disturbed me that I decided to give up driving cars — and that’s quite a big thing in California. People would ask me "What are you doing" and as I said that I was "walking for the environment" they said: "No, you’re just doing that to make us look bad, feel bad". I argued so much about that that on my 27th birthday I decided I would give it a rest, and stop talking for one day. It was very moving, because I began truly listening, and it was very sad for me because I realized that until then I had not really been learning. So I decided to do it for another day, and another day, until finally I promised myself that for one year I would keep quiet, and then on my birthday reassess what I had learned. That lasted 17 years. During that time I walked and played the banjo and wrote my journal and tried to study the environment by reading books and go to school. So I did, I walked to Oregon — 500 miles — and went into the registrar office and in two years I graduated with my first degree. And then I started walking again, to Washington, then to Montana. I’d written to the University of Montana two years earlier telling them that I would like to go to school there and I would be there in two years. They helped me, figuring out ways for me to get grades despite I didn’t have the money and I didn’t speak. I went on to the University of Wisconsin, and spent two years there writing about oil spills. And something happened: I was the only one in the US writing about oil spills. I went on, it took me 17 years and 1 day to walk around the US. My journey kept going on. I wrote for the US Coast Guard, I wrote oil spills regulations.I started talking because I had studied environment at a formal level, but there was an informal level, about people, and what we do and how we are. And environment changed from being about species and trees to be about how we treat ourselves and each other. So I had to spread that message. I still didn’t ride motorized vehicles. In my heart I had become a prisoner. The prison I was in was the fact that I did not drive or use motorized vehicles. When I started it seemed very appropriate to me. But at every birthday I asked myself about silence, but I never asked myself about my decision to use my feet. I realized that I had a responsibility to more than just me, and I was gonna have to change — and was afraid to change, because I was so used to the guy who just walked, that I didn’t know who I would be. But I knew I needed to change. Alot of times we find ourselves in this wonderful place where we’ve gotten to, but there is another place we have to go to, and we have to leave behind the security of who we have become and go go the place of who we are becoming.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written possibly one of the most
insightful books of the recent years. In "The Happiness Hypothesis", he
brings neuroscience and evolutionary psychology together with some of
the biggest ideas of philosophers and religious thinkers of the past,
trying to over come the idea that today we know better, and that those
great teachers had already discovered some of the true secrets of
happiness and of the meaning of life — and that they are quite
coherent with modern science.He studies morality and emotion in the
context of culture: why did we evolve to have morals, and to have
different morals? And what about the moral foundations of politics?Ideology and openness to experience is a discriminant of the way people behave.What is morality and where does it come from? The worst idea in all psychology is that the mind is a blank slate at birth. Truth is that we come to life already knowing alot. Nature provides a first draft, which then experience revises. Five foundations of morality:

Harm/care, that makes really bond with ohers, care for others

Fairness/reciprocity

Ingroup/loyalty, only among humans very large groups can join together and collaborate

Authority/respect

Purity/sanctity

If these are the five best candidates for what’s written in the first draft of our moral mind But as kids grow up, how is this first draft being modified? We’ve put a questionnaire online asking how people (conservatives and liberals) relate to these foundations of morality. Turns out that conservatives consider them very similarly; liberals are more attentive to the first two, less to the other three.What makes Ingroup, Authority and Purity moral? Order tends to decay. Loyalty is not enough, you need some sort of punishment to get people to cooperate in large group. Traditional morality uses every tool in the toolbox (including suppressing carnality etc) to make people collaborate, seek a higher end. Liberal morality rejects I/A/P. Liberals want change and justice even at risk of chaos; conservatives speak for institutions and traditions, and want order even at some cost for those at the bottom. So both liberals and conservatives have something to offer. Are conservatives and liberals like Yin and Yang? "If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind’s worst disease" (Sent-ts’an, c. 700 CE). Compare that to George Bush "with us or against us". Our righteous minds were "designed" by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams, and to blind us to the truth. As we heard from Samantha Power and her story of Sergio Vieira de Mello, we can’t just charge in. Alot of problems we have to solve require that we change other people, and if we want to change them, we need to understand our design, cultivate moral humility, and turn our understanding into a better future for us all.

British rockstar Bob Geldof is the closing speaker. In the late 1970s, Geldof was the leader of the Boomtown Rats, a British punk band. In the 1980s, he became a global activist, organizing Band Aid (to raise funds for the famine in Ethiopia), then, later, LiveAid. In 2005, he threw another giant global concert, Live8, trying to raise awareness for debt relief and poverty reduction. Since, he’s become active in alternative fuels and hybrid vehicles, and sees a link between fuel dependency and poverty-creating regimes. He calls TED "the Olympics of unreasonable people". There can’t be evolution of thought without differences, without challenges. Society needs to constantly test itself in order to get that change. Science can take us only so far. In the modern age, people are made a fetish of progress almost as an antidote of nihilism; we must believe that we’re moving forward, but sometimes science only adds a twist to a normal madness. I encountered that normal madness back in 1984, millions of people dying of poverty and hunger. In Europe, we paid taxes to produce food that we would never eat, and to destroy it. Eight miles south of Europe lied Africa, and 30 million people were dying of want, most very young. I was shocked, and I just thought that it wasn’t enough to do the usual dollar-in-the-box- I travelled around Africa and then went on TV and said that dying of want in a world of surplus was morally repulsive and also economically illiterate. The lingua franca of the planet is not English, it’s rock and roll, so we began that dialog in 1985. If the impulse of one human being to help another is not critical to the human spirit, then what is? The act of putting a dollar in the save-the-children box is a political act. It’s almost the political equivalent of the butterfly effect. If there are enough dollars, policy changes. If we are de-sensitized to the suffering of others something withers, something’s gone, some part of humanity is lost. But it drove me mad, there was no need for this to happen; poverty is an empirical condition.Africa will transform itself through technology, and the tech that will do it is the mobile phone.All of these things that happened to me are wrapped up in this idea: back in 1985 I trawled across the misery of others. I was in Niger. A politician told me: there were 300 separate languages here, and they’re gone. We can’t let that continue (see also Wade Davis’ speech). There is a great mapping of mankind to be undertaken, and that’s what I’m gonna do, with photos, music, film, text, and then we’re going to map the unfolding narrative of us, and we will watch ourselves unfold. Culture is the narrative of man, not politics. Human cultural diversity is as important to the life of the intellect as biological diversity is to nature. I want to build a Dictionary of Man, I want you to help me do so.

Ben Kaufman, founder of Kluster, goes on stage to tell what he and his team have been doing — with the help of TED attendees and 1200 people around the world — since the beginning of the conference. Kluster is an online collaboration and decision-making platform.
They set out Wednesday morning to develop a product, with some basic guidelines but "we didn’t know what it would be". They set up a studio in the conference’s venue, and got 208 ideas submitted in 24 hours. Collaboratively, it was decided that it would be an education board game; the content for it was developed; a name chosen ("OverThere" — the logo was submitted by a participant online); the rules set; a tagline developed; a full prototype developed (photo). 72 hours, 1200 participants, a board game "of social awareness" collectively invented, developed and prototyped: a pretty awesome piece of work.

Johnny Lee does research on human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University — and explains it via videos on YouTube. He goes on stage for a short talk explaining how at the tip of the Nintendo Wii remote controller there is a rather sophisticated infrared camera, and Johnny shows how, by pointing it to a projection screen or LCD display, you can create a low-cost white board; because the camera can see multiple dots, it becomes a multitouch screen as well. The audience goes: "wow!", and indeed what Johnny does is really cool. See the demos on his site.

Economist Paul Collier has written one of the most interesting books of
last year, "The Bottom Billion", identifying the traps that keep many
countries in poverty and outlining new ways to development through a
mix of direct aid and investment. He is the director of the Center for
the Study of the African Economies at Oxford.A billion people have been stuck living in economies that have been stopped for 40 years. So the question is: how can we give credible hope to that billion people. That’s in my mind the fundamental challenge of development. Two forces that change the world for good: and enlightened of self-interest. Compassion because a billion people are living in societies that can’t offer credible hope; enlightened of self-interest because of that economic divergence continues for another 40 years it will lead to disaster.What does it mean to get serious about providing hope for the bottom billion? A good guide is: what did we do last time the rich world got serious about developing another region of the wold? That goes back to the 1940s: the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Europe, financed by the rich US. It was not only compassion: it was also enlightened self-interest by America, because in Europe country after country was falling into the Soviet sphere of interest. What else did America do? Before the war the US had been very protectionist; after the war, total reversal of trade policy with the general agreement on tariffs and trade. Before the war, US had an isolationist security policy; after the war, posted troops in Europe. Before the war, the US treated national sovereignty so stringently that it didn’t even want to join the League of Nation; after the war, position reversed.Aid, trade, security, and governance. That frontier is still there. We need to be at least as serious as we were there.Let’s focus on governance. The opportunity we’re going to look to is a genuine basis for optimism about the bottom billion: the commodity boom. It’s pumping an unprecedented amount of money into many — not all — of the countries of the bottom billion. Partially because community prices are high, partly because there is a range of new discoveries and explorations. Between them, these new revenue flows dwarf aid. How is that gonna help development? What is the relationship between high commodity prices of exports and the growth of commodity-exporting countries. In the short time, the first 5-7 years, it’s great. Everything goes up. But in the long run, it reverses — "the resource curse". The critical issue is the level of governance. In fact, if you got good enough governance, there is no resource curse: you go up in the short term, and even more in the long run. Nigeria is worst off than if it never had oil. There is a threshold level of governance. Is the bottom billion above or below that threshold? Maybe we can be more optimisticDemocracy makes even more of a mess of the resource boom that autocracies. There are two distinct aspects of democracy: electoral competition, that determines how you acquire power, and checks and balances which determines how you use it. What the countries at the bottom billion need is very strongly checks and balances. They have elections, but not c-and-b. We should have some international standards, which would be voluntary but would spell out the basic needs. We know these standards because we already have one: the international extraction revenues transparency. It requires that governments report to their populations the revenues of extraction.What would the content be of these international standards? How to take the resources out of the ground, how to sell the rights for resource extraction. Now, a company flies in, make a deal with a minister, that’s great for the company and often for the minister, but rarely for the country. There is a piece of institutional technology that can work: verified auctions. Like the British Treasury sold wireless 3G licenses back in the early 2000 (the full story of that auction here – PDF). If we can create such standards, we can help the people in these societies. And yet, we’ve not got these rules. If you think about, the cost of promulgating international rules is very low. Why are they not there? Because until we have a critical mass of informed citizens in our own societies, politicians will get away with gestures — things that look good but don’t work. We have to go through the business of building an informed citizenry. That’s why I wrote an economic book that you can read on a beach.

Eric Kuhne,
architect and planner from London, gives a short talk about a new
city project in the Middle East, where symbolism and urban planning
interact. Architecture has become a new diplomacy. We want to restore
the storytelling qualities of cities. A city has been and always will
be the greatest work of art.

Three-minutes speech by Andy Hobsbawm is one of the founders of The Green Thing, a London-based online community that encourages people to behave more sustainably, one small step at a time, through information and fun. I’ve already blogged it here and here.

Last year was quite a year for former US vice-president Al Gore. He was awarded the Nobel prize for Peace (together with the IPCC), won an Oscar for his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth", and saw the theme of climate change gain center stage in the political and social discussion. He has spoken previously at TED, in 2006 (watch the video). He has a new speech related to his last book, "The Assault On Reason", which will also be turned into a documentary."I was reminded by Karen Armstrong’s presentation that if religion is not really about belief but about behaviour, maybe we should say the same thing about optimism. Optimism is often represented as an intellectual posture — Gandhi’s "You must be the change you wish to see in the world". But when we change our behaviour in our daily lives, we sometimes leave out the democracy and citizen part. In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis, and we have one. There is a bridge between the climate crisis and the crisis of extreme poverty in our world. We have to find a unified Earth theory. The struggles of climate change and extreme poverty and diseases are connected to the problems of overconsumption, wastefulness, economic transformation. We have to approach this as a unified challenge. Local, regional, global conflicts: each level requires a different allocation of resource, organizational model, etc. The climate crisis is the rare and strategic global conflict, we have to organize our response accordingly (BG: I partially disagree). What we do with the poorest countries matters to all of us. We have to act. Since that post-war economic boom, one aspect of the engine of economic growth was a pattern of consumption that morphed into overconsumption. The solution to the climate crisis requires that we replace that engine — consumption without overconsumption. We need a worldwide movement. But the political will needs to be mobilized in order to mobilize the resources.Gore discusses (and shows convincing images about) the melting of the Arctic icecap and the thawing of permafrost in the North; peak fishing; emissions. Venus and the Earth have roughly the same size. On Earth, carbon is trapped. On Venus, it’s in the atmosphere — and temperatures reach 855 degrees F.
The majority of Americans now think that climate change is a problem, that warming is real. But there still isn’t a sense of urgency. (He shows a video — a frame at left — with elephants falling from the sky, "every year the US emits CO2 for the equivalent weight of 1.2 billion elephants: It’s time to stop ignore 1.2 billion elephants in the room"). Solution: put a price on carbon. We need a CO2 tax, revenue-neutral, to replace taxation on emplomyent, which was invented by Bismarck and some things have changed since. In the poor world we have to integrate responses to poverty with solutions to the climate crisis. Responses can make a huge difference. Think of the "energy super grid" with solar energy produced in North Africa by solar and the energy sold to Europe (picture below). If you invest in tar sands, you have a subprime portfolio.

780 US cities are now supporting Kyoto. We heard a couple of days ago about the value of making individual heroism so commonplace that it becomes banal routine. What we need is another hero generation. Those of us who are alive in the US today, but also in the rest of the world, have to somehow understand that history has presented us with a choice. Just as Jill Taylor was figuring out how to save her life while she was distracted by the amazing stroke that she was witnessing.We now have a culture of distraction but we have a planetary emergency. We need to find a way to create a sense of generational mission. We have the capacity to do it.I’m optimistic, because I do feel very deeply that the kind of moving spirit that is celebrated in so many of the sessions that we’ve all been moved by here is alive in all of us. I believe we have the capacity at moments of great challenge to set aside the causes of distraction and rise to the historic challenges. Sometimes I hear people respond to the disturbing facts of the climate crisis by saying "this is so terrible, what a burden". Let’s reframe that: how many generations in all of human history have had the opportunity to rise to a challenge that is worthy of our best efforts, a challenge that can pull from us more that we knew we could to. We ought to approach this challenge with a sense of profound joy and gratitude that we are the generational about which 1000 years from now orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying: they swere the ones that found within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future. Let’s do that.Chris Anderson asks Gore whether he is excited by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s environmental plans. Gore: We should feel grateful that both of them and John McCain, all three have a position on the climate challenge, have offered leadership and an approach very different from the current administration. But the campaign dialog — often sponsored by the "clean coal" industry btw — has not laid the basis for the kind of bold initiative that is really needed. They’re saying the right things, and whoever of them is elected may do the right things. But when I came back from Kyoto in 1997 with a great feeling, and then confronted the US Senate and only a handful were willing to ratify that treaty: whatever the politicians say needs to be alongside what people say. The climate challenge is part of the fabric of our life. Changing the pattern is beyond anything we’ve done in the past. Change light bulbs, but change the politics too. I do believe that between now and November it is possible that the debate will get bolder. We can change things, actively. What’s needed really is a higher level of consciousness, and it’s hard to create, but it’s coming. As the African say: if you want to go quickly go alone, if you want to go far go together. We have to go far quickly.

Friday at TED@Aspen, we hosted live Talks from Walter Isaacson, the head of the Aspen institute, and the wonderful Ze Frank. Between TED sessions via satellite, we heard from David Gallo and William Lange of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Joy Mountford sharing amazing data visualizations, Ron Dembo and his ZeroFootprint carbon calculator, Reto Schnyder and his thoughts on Max Frisch’s I’m Not Stiller, and the Raspyni Brothers — who put on a completely terrifying show that risked the life of the world’s greatest poker player, as they juggled bowling balls over Phil Gordon’s head.

The TED Prize lunch at Aspen Meadows was buzzing with great ideas, with a rich cross-pollination and connection among the three winners and their wishes. After we rocked the entire Doerr-Hosier Center with the “Ode to Joy,” we rode the Silver Queen gondola, 3,000 feet up Aspen Mountain into an amazing starry sky, for dancing, drinking and more amazing conversation.

]]>tedstaffFluffThorne.jpg2302110011_1841fb4c22.jpgTED2008: Day 2 in Quoteshttp://blog.ted.com/ted2008_day_2_i/
http://blog.ted.com/ted2008_day_2_i/#commentsSat, 01 Mar 2008 10:30:56 +0000http://blog-staging.ted.com/2008/03/ted2008_day_2_i/[…]]]>“There have been bangs in the past. There will be bangs in the future. We may live in an endless universe.” – Physicist and TED Prize winner Neil Turok

“I have the modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry.” – Craig Venter, on his work creating synthetic lifeforms to generate alternative energy sources

“The line between good and evil is movable and it’s permeable.” – Psychologist Philip Zimbardo

“They’ve lowered the transaction cost of stopping genocide.” – Samantha Power on 1-900-GENOCIDE

“Chris Anderson is a computer-fabricated artifact.” – Paul Rothemund, joking about his work manipulating DNA, as if it were a computer program

“A lot of religious people prefer to be right, rather than compassionate.” – Religion scholar and TED prize winner Karen Armstrong

“ ‘Temes’ [technology-enhanced memes] don’t care about us – they simply want to create more of themselves. Don’t think we created the internet for our own benefit – think about temes spreading for themselves because they must.” – Susan Blackmore

“Beauty and truth do not reside in the object themseles, but rather in the nature of the exchange between the object and the viewer,” -Thomas Krens

“Whoa dude, nice equations!” – Garrett Lisi, the “surfer dude” physicist, introducing his talk by displaying an enormously complex equation on screen. He went on to explain his controversial “theory of everything” without using equations

Anthropologist Helen Fisherstudies romantic love — its evolution, its biochemical foundations, and its importance to human society. She gave a talk at TED2006 (watch the video). Her current research is on why we fall in love and how.In the jungle of Guatemala, she says, stands a temple. It was built by the king of the Mayas, who was buried under it when he died. Mayan inscription proclaims that he was deeply in love with his wife, so he built a temple on her honor facing his. The sun rises behind one and sets behind the other: after 30’000 years these two people still kiss from their tombs. Anthropologists have not find any society that doesn’t know love. Have you ever been rejected by somebody you really loved? Have you ever dumped someone who really loved you? About 97% of people, men and women, say yes to those questions. Romantic love is one of the most powerful sensations on Earth. We are currently looking at the data of brain scans of people that have just been dumped, and we find alot of activity in the region associated with romantic love. We found activity in other brain regions also, in one associated with calculating gains and losses. What have I learned? Romantic love is a universal human drive — not the sex drive — that it allows you to focus your energy into a single energy. Of all the poems, Plato: "the God of love lives in the state of need". Love is a need, like hunger and thirst. I have come to believe that romantic love is also an addiction. It has all of the characteristics of an addiction, you focus on a person, you obsess about him/her, you need to see more of her/him. Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth.Animals also love. There is not a single animal on this planet that would copulate with anything that comes along, unless you’re stuck in a lab cage. I’ve looked at 100 species and everywhere in the wild animals have favorites. Our newest experiment — putting people who report they’re still in love in a long-lasting relationship into the functional MRI. And we find the same data, that region of the brain still becomes active 25 years later. Why do you fall in love with one person rather than another? Match.com came to me three years ago and asked me that question, and I’ve researched it ever since. Psychologists tell you that we tend to fall in love with people with the same general level of intelligence, good looks, values, social status, but we don’t know what makes two personalities really stick together to form a stable couple. I’ve concocted a questionnaire to analyze — through biochemical analysis — who chooses whom to love.

David Griffin is the director of photography for the National Geographic magazine — the Vatican of photography. On his blog, Editor’s Pick, he discusses the creation of the extraordinary photos published in the magazine.He starts by showing some great — truly awesome — pictures by NG photographs, including the iconic portrait of the "Afghan Girl", Sharbat Gula(picture right) photographed by Steve McCurry and who did the NG cover in 1985.Last year NG has added a section to their website ("Your Shot") where anyone can submit photographs to be considered for publication — and it has been a runaway success. Everyone of us has one or two great photographs in us, but to be a great photojournalist you need to take great photos all the time. Griffin goes on to tell great stories of photojournalism: in African national parks, in Indian slums, underwater in Baja California and New Zealand, in Chinese jellyfish markets, in the military medical system in Irak, etc.Photography can be used to address our biggest issues. But sometimes photojournalism is just plain interesting or fun. Photography can make a real connection to people, and can be employed as a positive agent to understand the challenges and opportunities facing us today.

Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize and advocate of the private exploration of space. When I met Stephen Hawking (who spoke on Wednesday at TED), he told me his dream was to travel into space. I told him I could not take him there, but I could take him to weightlessness. The way to do so is through parabolic flights (fly up, then go into free fall, which gives you a few dozens seconds of weightlessness). And so we brought Stephen Hawking there (picture left – see video).

Chris Abani is a Nigerian writer and political activist (twice imprisoned and tortured in his country). His 2004 novel "GraceLand" is a bitterly funny tale of a young Nigerial Elvis impersonator in Lagos. Abani was a speaker at TEDGLOBAL in Tanzania, last year.My search is to find stories of everyday people that transcend us, that don’t look away at the reality: we are never more beautiful than when we are ugly. What I’ve come to learn is that the world is never seen in the grand gestures, but in the accumulation of the simple, soft, selfless acts of compassion. In South Africa they say "Ubuntu": the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. Which means that there is no way for us to be human without other people.So Abani tells stories of people. People standing up to soldiers wanting to kill them. People being compassionate. People being human, reclaiming their humanity, recognizing that we are surrounded by amazing people, who offer all of us the mirror to a whole humanity.

Benjamin Zander has been for almost 30 years the conductor of the Boston Philarmonic — and a speaker on leadership. He uses music to help people open their minds."There are people that think that classical music is dying, and others who think that we haven’t seen anything yet. Rather than going into statistics of orchestras dying, we should do an experiment." He is on stage with a piano, and uses it to play Chopin and tell stories of musical
learning and amazement, walking around on stage and down into the
audience, and at the end of his speech, he gets the TEDsters to stand and sing Beethoven’s "Ode to Joy". (They distribute the text written phonetically, but as a German speaker, I can’t read it — I’d never realized that if you speak a language, it’s very difficult to read its phonetic rendering — so I have to look up the original text: "Freude, schöner Götterfunken…")

This is about the point in the program where all the attendees start to talk about TED as an endurance sport. We’re mid-way, but it’s so intense that it feels like it has been going on for weeks…

The session, on "How do we create?", which will be moderated be TED’s June Cohen, opens with inventor-collector Jay Walker — who, as I already said in previous posts, has lent several dozen objects from his personal library to TED for the creation of this year’s stage — showing a few pictures of his fabled "library of the imagination", a 3-stories-high trove designed like an Escher painting, with glass bridges connecting upper levels, walls covered with ancient manuscripts, and incredible artifacts of human creation. Here a picture, possibly never seen before:

If you’ve seen and enjoyed "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "Star Wars"
(episodes I and II), a large part of your enjoyment was due to visual
effects wizard John Knoll of Industrial Light and Magic. Incidentally,
he’s also one of the co-inventors of graphic-editing softwarePhotoshop. So John knows his way in the alleys of creativity. Visual effects in the script are what you can’t go out and shoot, sometimes because it doesn’t exist, or because it’s too dangerous (incredible stunts) or just not possible to do in any other way (he shows examples). There are different techniques to overcome this problem: matte paintings (an old technique for creating virtual sets where they painted landscapes on pieces of glass, superposing them on the original footage; now it’s done digitally of course), miniatures, blue/greenscreen composites, and computer graphics. John compares images from 1954’s "20’000 Leagues Under The Sea" with "Pirates": ships, sea battles, sea monsters scenes, simulation of water and waves.

Over
the past decade San Francisco-based designer Yves Béhar and
his firm Fuseproject have produced game-changing designs for cell phone
headsets (Jawbone), shoes (Birkenstock), computers (OLPC’s XO laptop)
or table lamps (Herman Miller’s "Leaf"). A while back Fast Company
magazine published a great profile of Yves.His mother is Swiss, his father Turkish, he grew up in Switzerland, and he shows some of the objects that were around the home — furniture, carpets. "I realized that objects tell stories — and storytelling has been a big influence on my work. Then there was another influence, from my teen passions, ski and windsurfing — so I combined them into a contraption for surfing over frozen lakes. Then, design school, where I asked alot of questions — do people really need the caps-lock key on a computer keyboard? — and found this quote: "Advertising is the price companies pay for being un-original". I moved to SF, created my own firm, and started working on projects — watch, furniture, etc. The "Leaf" lamp was meant to create a new experience of light, giving a choice for the user to go from a glowing moonlight to a very bright worklight, and everything in between — we designed both the lamp and the bulb. All of these projects have a humanistic side to them.Jawbone — the Bluetooth headset (photo below left) — has a humanistic side: it feels you skin and knows when you’re talking and when you’re talking it filters out the other surrounding noises. But it’s also about taking out the techie stuff and make it beautiful — if it isn’t beautiful, it really doesn’t belong on your face. Design is never done — you have to do all this other stuff, packaging etc — and continue to touch the user. We developed a bottle for a vitamin-infused organic drink targeted at kids: the bottle is symmetrical from every side, and can have a second life as a toy using connectors. And because "why?" is one of the questions that kids ask more often, we called it Y Water(photo right):

His most recent project: NYC Condom, launched on Valentine’s day. The Dept of Health in NY needed a way to distribute 36 million condoms for free. fuseproject worked on a dispenser, which needs to be easily seviceable etc. They’re being installed all over the city. fuseproject also designed the condoms (and Béhar throws a handful of them into the audience…)If we all work together in creating value and keep in mind the values of the work that we do, maybe we can change the world.

Robert
J. Lang is an origami artist (origami: the ancient Japanese art of
paper-folding). He uses maths to analyze folding patterns and create
origamis with hundreds of folds and sophisticated curves. Most people still think that origami is flapping birds made of paper, but it’s really become something much more sophisticated — thank to mathematics. Origamis, Lang explains, revolve around crease patterns, and they all have to obey four laws: colorability (you can color them so that two colors never touch), always even folds (the number of folds always varies by two), alternate angles; and layer ordering (no matter how you stack a sheet, it can never penetrate a fold). If you obey these laws, you can do amazing things. And indeed, here are some of the origamis showed by Lang — they’re all single-sheet folds:

This has also allowed the creation of origami on-demand, including graphics, ads, and commercials. This for example is a video ad for Mitsubishi: everything in the ad is an origami, except the car:

The "extreme folding" structures developed for origamis turn out to have applications in medicine, science, and engineering: things like packing airbags, heart implants and spaceship and space telescope parts into the smallest
possible places. "An origami, someday, may even save a life".

Writer Amy Tan — American of Chinese
descent — has written a series of bestselling novels, including "The
Bonesetter’s Daughter" and "The Kitchen God’s Wife". She’s also
written children books and has appeared in The Simpsons. She focuses on
the creative process, journeying through her childhood and family history looking for hints of where her own creativity comes from. The value of nothing: out of nothing comes something. That’s an essay she wrote when she was 11 and got a B+. How do we create? She shows a triangle with corners at Nature, Nurture and Nightmares. Some people would say that we’re born with it; others that creativity may be a function of some neurological quirk; part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis (why I am not Black like everything else in my school class?), with childhood traumas, with expectations. "This led to my big questions: why do things happen, how do they happen, and how do I make them happen? When I look at creativity, my inability to repress associations with everything about me is key". She goes off doing a comparison between quantum mechanics and creativity: "you’ve alot of unknown; dark energy and dark matter; the observer effect — if you try too hard what you’re hoping to find by serendipity at the end is no longer there; ambiguity; multi-dimensions. Much has to do with intention. You notice disturbing hints from the universe, and then in a way I knew that they’ve always been there. What I need in effect is a focus. When I have a question, I have a focus, and all these object go through that question. You think that there is some coincidence or serendipity that your’e getting all this help from the universe, but it really is that now you’ve a focus. Why am I here? When I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous, it seems so obvious, and yet it is not. We all hate moral ambiguity, and yet it is so necessary in writing a story, it’s the place where I begin. Luck, chance of course, and accidents also play a role, often a mysterious role. How do I create something out of nothing? By questioning, and acknowledging that there are no absolute truths. By thinking about luck and fate, coincidences and accidents, God’s will and the synchrony of mysterious forces. By thinking about our role. By imagining fully and becoming what is imagined. And that’s how I find particles of truth. So there are never complete answers. Or if there is one is it to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything, and that’s good. And if there is a more complete answer, it is to simply imagine. Imagination is the closest thing to feeling compassion".She carried a bag on stage at the beginning of her speech. She opens it now to reveal what’s in the bag: her dog, who trots out of stage .

June shows a clip from Marjane Satrapi‘s animated movie "Persepolis", based on her autobiographical novel of the same name about a young girl coming of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution.

Tod
Machover is the Head of the MIT Media Lab‘s Hyperinstruments/Opera of
the Future Group (now that’s a job title). He has composed five operas
and invented several musical technologies, including "hyperinstruments"
— an approach that extends virtuosity. (Yo-Yo Ma and Prince among others have
adopted it). "We all love music, but it’s more powerful if you don’t just listen to it but make it. Everybody in the world has the power to be part of music in a very dynamic way. At the Media Lab we’ve been engaged in an approach called Active Music. We started by making hyperinstruments that have all kind of sensors built in, so the instrument knows how it is been played. We asked ourselves: why can’t we make instruments like those for everybody — and that produced the Brain Opera, and Guitar Hero. Music is very transformative, can change your life, your body, your mind.Music, even better than words, is a powerful way to explain who we are. If I was playing cello here I could share things about myself that I can’t do in words. Music is a very powerful interface". Machover shows the "Chandelier", a central set piece in a new opera he’s written called "Death and the Powers" which will premiere in Monaco in September 2009: it’s both a sculpture and a new kind of musical instrument (picture right). Most recently, Machover has focused on using music in therapy
for the physically and mentally handicapped and on developing
technologies to allow them to compose and perform music. What if I could make an instrument that adapt to I really am, to my real capacities, Machover asks, and he calls up on stage Adam Boulanger, a PhD student working with him, and Dan Ellsey,
a cerebral palsy patient in a wheelchair. Dan
communicates via a computer-controlled "talking box". Boulanger and Machover developed technology allowing Dan to use his limited possibilities of expression to create and perform music by using both
brain waves and small movements of his face and eyes. Dan performs his composition — and the music is great, and it gets a standing ovation.